Automated and semi-automated machines have been employed for processing documents such as bulk mail. Due to the large quantity of mail received by many companies, there has long been a need for efficient sorting of incoming mail. In this regard, document sorting has become particularly important in the area of remittance processing.
Utility companies, phone companies, and credit card companies routinely receive thousands of payment envelopes from their customers on a daily basis. Typically, a customer payment envelope contains an invoice stub and some type of customer payment, usually in the form of a bank check or money order. The contents of each envelope are generally referred to as a transaction, and may consist of one or more documents including one or more invoice and/or one or more check. The most common transaction consists of a single invoice stub and an accompanying payment check.
According to conventional methods of automated or semi-automated remittance processing, the documents, such as an invoice and an accompanying check, are processed by being extracted from the envelopes, placed in the proper sequence and orientation, and then stacked into groups or batches of documents. The extraction, sequencing and orienting of the invoices and checks has been effected both manually and by the use of automated or semi-automated equipment. Once arranged in stacks, the sequenced and oriented invoices and checks are then separated into groups of documents. This grouping, referred to as batching, is typically performed manually by inserting batch tickets into the stacks of documents to physically define selected batches of documents. The stacks of batched invoices and checks are then transferred to a separate remittance processing device and fed through the device multiple times to effect the necessary remittance processing. Because the stacks of invoices and checks are transferred to a separate remittance processing device after the documents have been extracted form the envelopes, errors may arise in determining which documents belong to which distinct transaction. Errors may arise in defining transactional boundaries because the documents have already been separated from the envelopes that physically and accurately define the boundaries for each transaction before processing is commenced on a remittance processing apparatus. Therefore, the remittance processing apparatus must attempt to determine the transitional boundaries based on the sequence of the documents that are fed through the apparatus. If the sequence of documents is not predetermined and precisely maintained, the transactional boundaries may be misplaced. For example, if more than one check is enclosed with a single invoice, it becomes difficult after the extraction has already been performed to ascertain whether the additional check should be included with the preceding or the following transactional documents. As a result, a check from one transaction may be processed erroneously with an invoice from another transaction.
Other problems may also arise whenever the invoices and the checks are not in proper uniform sequence or in the proper orientation. For example, the lack of proper sequencing and orientation may cause misreads or errors during a remittance processing run. If a check is being read instead of an invoice due to an improper sequence, the appropriate information will not appear at the proper location on the document during document imaging. Likewise, if a check is not in its proper orientation, an image of the back of the check may be misread as the front of the check. In accordance with the present invention, an apparatus and method are provided for extracting documents from envelopes, reordering and reorienting the documents, and imaging and storing data regarding the documents so that the association among the documents in the transactions is known during subsequent remittance processing and the proper images are acquired and stored for the documents.